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So yesterday —after a few last-minute adjustments— I finally took the FrankenBike on a long-ish ride up the mountains. A 75 mile route of non-stop twists to Courtright Reservoir via Shaver Lake and back. 150 miles total.

From 4-lane curvy highways to twisty little back roads, the ride had it all and the FrankenBike proved to be a fantastic machine that carved every curve like a champion.

So today I finally took the FrankenBike outside the city borders for a quick test ride. I went northeast on Tollhouse to the old Millerton Road; nice little back road with easy fun twists. Then I went up to Sky Harbor Rd and back to Fresno via Friant.

I also tested the bike on freeways. At first I was a bit surprised to see the tach above 5,200 RPM @70 MPH until I realized I was not on the Vee anymore :p

So a couple of weeks ago I was messing around on svrider.com (a Suzuki SV650 online community), jokingly asking for a free bike –because I really miss the SV I sold a few months ago– when a member of the board offered to give me a frame he had in his garage. It didn't take too long for others to chime in and start offering spare parts to build a bike. As a fun progression of things, yet another member named me the official builder of a Frankenbike, a bike made of donated parts.

It was only a few days after that that that this package arrived at my door...

Only four days ago this terrible accident happened at Mulholland Hwy in California. The video went viral overnight and —as of the time I'm writing this blog post— it has more than one million views.

This accident shows a perfect example of what improper body positioning can cause. If only the rider had been more in balance with the dynamic forces acting upon him and his bike —and had he been looking through the turn— this accident could have been easily avoided; instead, the rider panicked and fixated his sight on the cyclist. Once you incur into target fixation, your mind is already in "survival mode" and it is hard —almost impossible— to correct your course.

Awesomely, rnickeymouse, the camera person and poster of the Youtube clip, linked to one of my past articles as part of the description of the video...

The way you position your body on the motorcycle can have a great effect on your concentration and make the difference between panicking/freezing in the middle of a turn or feeling comfortable/confident to complete the same turn

Over the last few years I have heard many riding coaches talk about the Survival Reactions that cause riders to "freeze" and crash way too often when they enter a corner and their brains somehow go into "panic mode". All those coaches say that those Survival Reactions are bad but natural, that they'll be there in every turn... that you just have to learn how to "deal with them".